


Sandy Week

by GretchenSinister



Category: Rise of the Guardians (2012)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-24
Updated: 2019-02-25
Packaged: 2019-11-04 16:04:01
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 2,771
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17901221
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/GretchenSinister/pseuds/GretchenSinister
Summary: Responses to the prompts for Sandy Week, which took place June 3-9, 2014.





	1. Auguries (Day 1: Sand)

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted on Tumblr on 6/3/2014.
    
    
    To see a World in a Grain of Sand
    And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,
    Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand 
    And Eternity in an hour.  
          --William Blake  
      
    

 _Why sand?_ Someone had asked him once, or maybe a thousand times. They had really wanted to know, but Sandy had only smiled. It wasn’t the kind of thing that could easily be explained to someone so eager for an answer.

            Why sand? Because it was all dreamsand, from the salt-fine beach to the toasted desert ridge, from brown-sugar riverbank to scorched volcano-rind shores.

            No two grains alike, and no grain empty of a story. The lives and deaths of monsters and stranger-than-monsters, the ossification of bones larger than a human and teeth made to bite incomprehensible boneless things that left only beaks for the sea to caress into secret-laden fragments. The histories told by water as it gently-not-gently reminded rock that  _solid_  was not, is not, and never will be  _permanent_. The return of glass to the place of its birth, losing the shape given to it by human hands, retaining only a whisper of those hands’ world-shaping power in the clear redandblueandgreen of the grains, clearer than any gem.

            The sand, the sand gathered even by waking hands, was a book of alien lives and the malleability of stone, of the way in which art vanished and did not vanish, a book with no words, a book which could be read only by the reader imagining every word, a book which could be understood only by letting go of words, words like “fact” and “millennia” and “history”.

             _Why sand?_  What else  _but_  sand? Sandy wondered, as the coastlines of lost continents were tracked into houses and tiny hands built towers from the skulls of dragons.


	2. Someday Singing (Day 2: Quiet)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Originally posted on Tumblr 6/3/2014.

He does not speak because he can’t. He does not speak because he doesn’t want to wake anyone up. He does not speak because silence is golden.

            Jack offered the last guess and made Sandy laugh—silently, of course.

            However, none of these reasons truly explains his silence. Rather, he does not speak because he has found that the quiet is just as much his realm as dreams themselves.

            Like a dream, a quiet moment is a space of potential, an open field in the mind, a boundless sea in the heart. In quiet waits inspiration. Quiet presents no dams nor set channels for the inner spring of the soul. Quiet does not demand. It allows. Quiet does not define the world by naughty and nice, quiet does not hold the fixity of the past, quiet does not buzz with thoughts of the future, quiet did not demand the constant negotiations of games.

            Like dreams, quiet arrives with no outside structure. Like dreams, it allows for the creation of new structures.

            Even though Sandy saw the world mostly as it slept, he knew that such moments had always been needed, and now were needed as sorely as ever. And so, in silence, he guided all unguided moments, for the waking and sleeping alike.

            Someday, though, he hoped to sing.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Comments from Tumblr:
> 
> cenobitesquid said: Ahhhhh ;__: This is so beautiful, I love it <3


	3. Revision (Day 3: Imagination)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Originally posted on Tumblr 6/4/2014.

 The edges of the sky spill over with falling stars, silver and gold and tiny and perfect, sweep a hand through them, they feel like champagne bubbles, they shattersparkle on your palm and the fragments splash your lips like frozen lemonade, they catch in your hair like so many netted butterflies.

            Stars aren’t like this, stars were never like this, not even when you were a falling star, and were you a falling star? How can that be? Did you really fall, you who are still so bright? What does falling mean when you can fly so high?

            The misty swells of clouds slide under your hands like the flanks of great beasts swimming through the sky, their platinum-gray fur soft and insubstantial as whispers in the dark between two on summer-dewy grass, which is to say, substantial enough for you to press your face into and feel the warmth against your lips.

            Clouds aren’t like this, clouds were never like this, not when you were a pilot, diving and dipping through the vapor of a hundred worlds, caring for nothing but showing off your gleaming ship under a hundred colors of sunlight. And were you a pilot? How strange to think of days so fleshfragile that a ship was the only way you could fly! How could that be, when you are now as you are? Did the rank of pilot ever mean something to you, you who fills the sky with marvels? Who could even have conferred such a rank upon you?

            You do not know this as you know who has given you the sky, who has made you not a star, not a pilot, but yourself, perhaps the self that was in you all along as a star, as a pilot, if these things you ever were.

            As you shape the stars and clouds into better brighter things, you feel the imagination of those below buoying you up, lightening your heart and are you not all heart? It is surely safe for you to be so, up here, as they give you only strength and you give them dream upon dream upon dream. They imagine you over and over again and you would shout for joy with the glory that their visions make you, but you cannot and you are not sure why, you are brilliant and powerful and strange, they love you and they tell you that you were never like them, never, never, never, and it is true enough, let you never have been a fallen star with comrades all fallen never rising.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Comments from Tumblr:
> 
> tejoxys said: SANDY NO. Owww. Dang it, Gretchen.
> 
> marypsue said: This was wondrous and fantastic and then the last line was like being solidly punched in the gut.


	4. Empathy and Peace (Day 4: Cloud)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Warning: Relevant but deceptive title.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Originally posted on Tumblr 6/4/2014.

Alone on his cloud for the first time since Easter, Sandy looks at the swirling golden sand beneath his feet, clasping his hands together. He knows there really isn’t any reason to worry. When he had first become himself again, he had shaped thousands of pure, good dreams in those early hours. But he hadn’t been alone, then. He shifts his gaze to his hands. Golden. Golden as they ever have been, save once.

 

            He shivers, unwillingly recalling the moment. The arrow strike had been more surprising than painful, the blacks sand of the arrow splattering over him rather than piercing him. Physical pain had never been Pitch’s concern. But horror always was.

            Sandy’s power and ease in crafting visions backfires upon him as the details of the scene force their way into his mind against his conscious will. The oily feel of corruption seeping through his robes and deeper, distracting him from his cloud and allowing the black sand to eat away at its edges. The fear, growing fast and sharp, but, thanks to the corruption, almost not unwanted. His hand, his own golden hand, fading to a dead gray. His knees buckling, tipping him forward. Reaching out to catch himself with that gray hand. Watching helplessly as he turned his own dreamsand black.

            He tears himself back to the present, back to his new cloud, his safe golden cloud, gold as if it had never been black. He still hasn’t touched it with his hands, and he probably won’t do so tonight. He takes deep breaths and slowly looks around, checking to see that the dreamsand already winding down to the sleepers has not…changed…with his distress. It hasn’t but perhaps this is only because he has not touched it. Perhaps not. He doesn’t want to check.

            The fear is still so, so strong. Does that mean he’s still not free of the corruption? How can he know, know for sure? None of the other Guardians can check, none of them know, it was all  _through_  him and they couldn’t understand. He curls his shoulders forward, gripping his hands together more tightly. There will be no reassurance. But he will have to touch the dreamsand sometime, even though the touch will never be carefree again, he must always watch, to see if the cheerful light and warmth is being changed to the dark and cold of the space between the stars, changed by  _him_. By him!

            He rests his head in his hands, heedless in this. The worst of it, the very worst of it, is that he can’t blame Pitch for this continuing nightmare. Pitch intended for him to die. He hadn’t planned this torment. It’s his own mind doing that, his own mind whispering to him of the horror that might wait in him no matter what he does. His own mind, that’s now, and maybe ever more…a little bit more like Pitch’s.

            The thought strikes him that he’d trade empathy for peace, and he can’t help but wonder if he should be entrusted with either.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Comments from Tumblr:
> 
> tejoxys said: >:O Oh my god, I’m so upset. I’m loving these ficlets for the insight into Sandy’s character, but aagh I can’t stand the idea of him just suffering indefinitely, this is so sad


	5. The Angels (Day 5: Stars)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Unpleasant modeling AU.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Originally posted on Tumblr on 6/5/2014.

 “This isn’t going to last,” Sandy says to Tooth.

            She rolls, all watercolor-tattooed limbs and jewel-toned hair, toward him, meeting his eyes over her pink-lensed sunglasses. “Yes? My god, Sandy, imagine if things were permanent!” She languorously stretches the arm she’s not resting on high into the air. As she brings it down, she pauses to fluff her hair. “How do I look?”

            “Like a startled bird,” Sandy answers.

            Tooth laughs. “Good! One of the advantages of a day off.”

 

            Sandy frowns. “I want to talk about this, Tooth. This isn’t going to last and I’m afraid of what will happen when it ends.”

            “What do you mean, what will happen? Things don’t just happen; you’ll be able to make decisions.”

            “Maybe.” Sandy rests his head on his arms along the side of the pool. “How do I look, Tooth?”

            “Like an angel,” she says. It’s what she always says, but she means it, too. Sandy’s sweet round face flirts dangerously with androgyny even without makeup, with his huge honey-brown eyes, button nose, and full lips; his tan is one of the few she’s ever seen that could legitimately be called golden, and his hair naturally falls into golden ringlets.

            “I’m a novelty.”

            “What’s wrong with new things?”

            “Tooth…come on. That’s not what I meant. No one in this town takes my picture because they think I look like an angel. Fuck, I don’t even look like I’m the same species as the rest of the people in the shoots sometimes.” He pushes himself away from the pool wall so he’s only hanging on with his fingertips. “I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but I’ve stopped eating in front of people.”

            “You’re not…?” Tooth doesn’t finish the question, as if it’s unlucky to say. Sandy thinks about making her say it, but what would be the point? They both know what she means.

            “No,” says Sandy. “What would the point be, anyway? I’m so damn short for a guy.” He draws close to the pool’s edge again. “I’ve started to hate my smile. I hate reading nice things that kids from all those corn states send me. I don’t care about the mean shit. But so many of those kids think that me being dressed up and made up and photographed means that something’s going to change, and it doesn’t, at all! I’m a novelty! I’m not supposed to be a new wave! I’m meant to be one grain of sand that makes no difference on the whole beach, and a token so when people ask them ‘why don’t you do that?’, they can point to me and say ‘it’s already been done.’” He turns to look at the rest of the crystal-blue pool. It seems as vast as the sky. He can’t drown in it though, it wouldn’t be poetic. Not for him. “I hate all of it. They’ve given me everything I have and made me want more and I swallow more ‘fuck yous’ every day.” He scowls. “Their approval is the worst thing to get addicted to. They’ve got the only source. And when they decide they don’t want me, when they decide it’s time for this star to go supernova…they don’t want me to be a nebula, giving birth to more stars like me. And I don’t want to be a black hole.”

            “I don’t think I get the second part of that metaphor,” Tooth says.

            “I don’t want to end up like Pitch Black.” Sandy shakes his head. “He didn’t do what they wanted him to do, and now he’s in prison. Goddamn  _prison_ , Tooth! For doing things I’ve seen other people do literally every weekend. And he looked right.”

            Tooth raises her eyebrows. “Stop going to parties every weekend where you see people snorting coke off of seventeen-year-olds’ asses. Anyway, aside from that, what are you going to do?”

            “I don’t know. I just wanted to tell you because you’re the only person within a thousand miles I thought I could be honest with.”

            “What else do you want to do, then?”

            Sandy leans back his head to re-wet his hair. “I don’t know that either. Maybe grant wishes so I can stop coming up with my own. Stop keeping their money.”

            “If you’re serious about that, you should come talk to North.”

            “Your sugar daddy?”

            Tooth blows a raspberry at him. “I made sure I’d never need a sugar daddy before I got all these tattoos and took the implants out. North just likes giving things to people. And I think that he’d think that  _Nebula_  would be a really cool name for an agency.” 


	6. Before (Day 6: Dreams)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sometimes I like alternate origin stories for Sandy (and Pitch). They’re practically baby spirits here. Also, before you say I am doing the thing, I did the bright spirit/the dark spirit bit because they don’t have names yet.
> 
> Very pre-blacksand if you want.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Originally posted on Tumblr 6/6/2014.

 “Do you dream?” The thin dark being who is not yet Pitch asks the round, bright being who is not yet Sandy.

             _Never_ , they answer,  _or always_.

            The dark being scoffs when they don’t continue. “Are our conversations always going to be this extensive and clear?”

             _So you like words. I don’t,_  the bright being signs, or whispers, or—the dark being finds it difficult to tell. Somehow, it is communicated.

             _I’d rather show you_.

            “You would accept my company?”

             _Why not?_

            “I don’t know.”  
            The bright being smiles and beckons them to sit beside them on their cloud of light. A strange cloud. From the corners of their eyes it looks almost as if it is fragmented into millions of tiny grains.

            Once they’ve settled, the bright being lifts their hands and directs the cloud to the east, their flight swifter than that of any bird.

            Before they reach the dawn, the bright being carries them down into a small village and into a tent where a woman sleeps.  _Watch_. The bright being leans out from the cloud and over her in defiance of gravity, and presses their hands to her temples. At once, in shining gold above her head, the dark being can see a vision of a village much like the one in which the woman currently slumbers.

            With an intent look tempered by a smile, the bright being plays with the golden images, shaping them into wonders the dark being has never seen on the earth and doubts they ever will.

            They go on shaping even as dawn breaks, and the dark being continues to watch in wonder, even as they must shrink and slide around the tent to avoid the ray of sunlight piercing through the entrance.

            Finally, the woman stirs, and the bright being moves away. She opens her eyes, and the images dissolve.  _That moment is one I don’t know,_ the bright being explains.  _There’s a difference, for them, between dreaming and not. A vast difference. I feel the change in them, even when I’m not so close. I’ve never felt such a change, so perhaps I’ve never dreamed. But the way the world is to me…I can already do all the things their dreams let them do. So perhaps I’m always dreaming._

            “I want to try dreaming,” the dark being says. “Please? Anyway…” he looks away, “I have to wait here as long as the sun shines.”

            The bright being nods.  _I like to make dreams, you know. You don’t have to ask. If you like it, I’ll make sure you always have them, even if you’re not like the others I give dreams to._

            “Always?” The dark being repeats, watching the bright being as they curl up in a shadowy curve of the tent.

             _Forever and ever,_ the bright being signs, and the dark being closes their eyes. When the sun moves around, the bright being puts on more of a body to shield the other. The warmth of the sun on their physical back startles them with delight, and they put it into the dream, since the dark being can’t feel it any other way.

            They think, if they dreamed, they would dream of moments something like this.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Comments from Tumblr:
> 
> xxdaimonxx said: baby spirits pitch and sandy give me life

**Author's Note:**

> Comments from Tumblr:
> 
> Re: Auguries  
> cenobitesquid said: askjhg another amazing ficlet, oh man, these are just brilliant <3 <3


End file.
